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Housing & Homelessness blog
How an Environmental Law Became a Weapon Against Student Housing The People's Park fight in Berkeley shows how lawsuits under California's environmental review law stalled student housing, and how the state rewrote the rules in 2023 and 2025. How to Document Housing Code Violations and Demand Repairs in Writing How to keep a repair log, take useful photos, call a housing inspector and write a repair letter that holds up, with the 1970 Javins case that made habitability law. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and the Chicago Neighbors Who Won It How a West Side Chicago homemaker and a coalition of block clubs forced Congress to make banks disclose where they lend, then lend where they take deposits. The Housing Act of 1949 and Its Promise of a Decent Home for Every Family Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949 promising a decent home for every American family. Here is how its public housing goals were cut, delayed and steered by local politics. California's Duplex Law Promised Homes on Every Lot and Delivered Few SB 9 let California homeowners split lots and build duplexes almost anywhere. Few did. Here is why costs, local rules and financing blunted the law, and what California tried next. Evanston's Housing Reparations Program and the Lawsuit Against It How an Illinois suburb funded the first local reparations program with cannabis tax money, how its housing grants work, and what the 2024 federal lawsuit argues. Housing First and the Thirty Years of Evidence Behind It Housing First began in 1992 New York with a simple bet: give people a home without preconditions. Three decades of trials show it keeps people housed. Here is the case and its limits. How Euclid v. Ambler Made Exclusionary Zoning the Law of the Land A 1926 fight over 68 acres outside Cleveland gave every American town the power to ban apartments. Here is how that happened and what reformers are doing about it. How Rent Strikes Work, and the Legal Risks Before You Withhold Rent General information on rent strikes, rent escrow, repair-and-deduct and the eviction risk of withholding rent, starting from the Harlem strikes of 1963 and 1964. How to Start a Community Land Trust in Your Town Where community land trusts came from, how the ground lease and resale formula keep homes affordable for good, and the steps a group of neighbours takes to form one and buy its first property. How to Start a Tenant Association in Your Building A step-by-step guide to organizing your neighbors into a tenant association: door-knocking, the first meeting, choosing demands and the legal protections that may apply. Levittown Sold the Postwar Dream and Wrote Black Buyers Out of It Levittown made the suburban house affordable for millions of white veterans while its contracts and federal mortgage rules kept Black families out. The gap it built never closed. New York's 2019 Rent Law and the Rules It Rewrote for Stabilized Apartments What the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 changed for New York's rent-stabilized apartments, what owners lost, and why the fight over it never stopped. Oregon Became the First State to Cap Rent Increases Statewide How Oregon's 2019 law, SB 608, limited yearly rent hikes and no-cause evictions, why it is not classic rent control, and what the cap has and has not done for renters. Pruitt-Igoe and the Myth That Public Housing Was Doomed to Fail The 1972 implosion in St. Louis became the symbol of failed public housing. The record shows the towers were starved of money and residents, not doomed by the idea itself. Rent Control and What the Economists Actually Found in San Francisco San Francisco's 1994 vote extended rent control to small buildings. A Stanford study found it kept tenants in their homes and shrank the rental supply. Both findings matter. Shelley v. Kraemer and the Racial Covenants Still Written in Old Deeds A Black family bought a St. Louis house in 1945 and was sued by the neighbors. How the 1948 ruling ended court enforcement of racial covenants, and why the words remain in deeds today. The Fair Housing Act Passed One Week After Dr. King Was Killed Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in the week after Dr. King's assassination, then gave it almost no teeth. How enforcement stayed weak for twenty years and what changed after. The Redlining Maps of the 1930s and the Neighborhoods They Shaped The Home Owners' Loan Corporation colored American neighborhoods red and green. Economists still argue over whether those maps caused decline or recorded it, and why the answer matters. The Supply Debate Splitting Progressive Housing Advocates Montana's Republican legislature passed sweeping zoning reform in 2023 while progressives still argue over supply. Here are the build-more and protect-tenants camps, stated fairly. The Tax Credit That Builds Most of America's New Affordable Rentals The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, born in Reagan's 1986 tax law, quietly finances most new affordable apartments. Here is how it works, who profits and why it is so slow. Utah's Celebrated Drop in Chronic Homelessness and the Questions It Raised In 2015 Utah said it had nearly ended chronic homelessness, and the country cheered. What the program really did, how the counting changed and what critics found later. What Minneapolis Learned After Ending Single-Family-Only Zoning Minneapolis became the first big US city to end single-family-only zoning in 2018. Few triplexes followed, but the city built a lot of housing and rents held steadier than nearby. Why Progressive Cities Became the Hardest Places in America to Build A San Francisco vote against 495 apartments on a parking lot shows how progressive cities made building slow and costly, and why the left has to own and fix its permitting problem.